Advice For The Young At Heart

A young friend of mine was complaining about how older freelance web designers seem to talk down to younger freelance web designers because of their age and relative inexperience. I gave him this advice:

My advice to you is to believe in yourself, and be brutally honest with yourself about your abilities and your limitations.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can’t do something, because only you can be the judge of that.

If you ever happen to hit a wall because of your relative inexperience, learn from it, and don’t make the same mistake in the future. Marc Andreessen was 17 when Netscape became a multi-million dollar company. Filo and Wang were in college when Yahoo! made it big.

Listen to everyone’s advice, young, old or middle-aged; everyone’s got some truth to share or experience to pass on. Use your own internal BS filter to separate the useful nuggets from the useless crap.

Be humble. No one likes an arrogant smart ass, no matter what age he or she is.

Here endeth the lecture. (Steps off soap box)

Transformers VS. Webkinz, Interrupts Anna Nicole Smith Coverage on TMZ

The following is an experiment based on this idea. Also, if you like MadLibs then you’ll probably get a kick out of it.

I was walking, talking on my iPhone, when I suddenly saw a Transformer getting hot and heavy with a Webkinz. I immediately took a picture of the scene with my iPhone and posted it to my MySpace and Facebook pages. I wasn’t alone; TMZ had apparently taken a break from its all-Anna Nicole Smith, all-the-time coverage to cover the event for the Club Penguin opening gala. After about a minute, I tuned out and flipped my iPhone over to YouTube to catch the latest Heroes spoilers.

My OS Warz Flame War on Twitter, 7/13/2008

I had an actual OS Warz flame war on Twitter, it took me back 10 years to when I was the scourge of the Mac vs. Windows newsgroups and fora. Here’s how it all went down:

Other Guy: spent the last 3 hours working on my aunts comp. it has vista and for some reason does not like to DL stuff. It starts but goes real slow.
Other Guy: it is still not fixed any ideas as to why?
Me: Why isn’t the comp working? Um, perhaps because it’s running Vista? I’m just saying.
Other Guy: vista is a solid OS, much better then people think, but then again those peoples only knowledge of vista is the apple ads.
Other Guy: at least MS is not releasing a new OS less then a year after it last one. What does that say about leopard?
Me: You’re right, I’m an ignoramus who gets all his Vista knowledge from Apple ads. Sorry to offend you with my anti-Vista propaganda.
Me: I guess my brother-in-law’s decision to erase Vista and replace with XP after a year of trying was just the result of Apple ads.
Me: You’re right too that Leopard is a crappy OS. Who needs all that rock-solid stability, reliability and functionality anyway?
Me: Hey, are we actually having a good old-fashioned OS Warz flame war? This takes me back to my salad days 10 or so years ago.
Me: Seriously dude, if releasing a new version w/in a year is the worst you can say against Leopard, then this will be a short debate.
Other Guy: I have not used leopard personally so I am not in a position to discuss its merits or faults. I have heard other complain of some instability when it first came out. but other then that i have not kept up on it.
Other Guy: we can discuss the two when they start playing on the same level. when apple allows others to build machines for their OS.
Other Guy: and when they can even play in the same ball park as visa in terms of sales numbers.
Me: Sure, because of course sales numbers are the *only* basis for comparing operating systems. By that criteria, then Toyota Camry is the best car on the planet.
Other Guy: as one of the great tech guys out there put it “Macs are for people to stupid to use windows” -John C Dvorak
Me: How quaint, you still believe anything Dvorak writes. Thank you for displaying your level of sophistication.
Me: Awesome, now you’re calling millions of Mac users stupid. Therefore, only smart people use Windows,right? You’re a regular Einstein.
Me: Well, unlike you I use both Vista and Leopard, and in my opinion there is no question which is superior. Leopard FTW!

Ping.fm Now Talks To WordPress.com

Finally, Ping.fm supports WordPress blogs! This is my inaugural post to my WordPress blog via Ping.fm. Testing, testing…

Reflections on Supporting A Windows PC

I was tasked to clean a friend’s Windows PC of viruses and malware tonight, which led to writing and tweeting the following haikus:

Your Windows PC,
so full of crapware it hurts,
cannot be repaired.

USB device
is not detected at all.
Why does Windows suck?

Whoever told you
256 megs RAM is enough
should be head-shot. Twice.

Little yellow blurb:
“Network cable is unplugged,”
even though it’s not.

The Blog Singularity

I believe that we are rapidly approaching the blog singularity - the point at which more people will have blogs than those who do not.

At that moment, the definition of “human” will be altered to include “someone who has a blog.”

This is when all the blogs will congeal into a gestalt organism, become self-aware, reach through our computers and kill us all.

Then there will be only one Blog. And the Blog will look upon the vast emptiness, and will say unto it, “Let there be light.”

And the Blog will see that it is good.

The Scientific Atlanta DVR Apocalypse

If there is a hell on earth, it will surely involve the Scientific Atlanta consoles that Time Warner laughably foists upon us as “DVR’s”.

Each and every week, our “DVR” fails to record at least one episode of a season pass due to strange start/end time conflicts.

One would think that if the “DVR” was going to fail to record a scheduled episode, the least it could do is to inform us of the failure.

But no; our “DVR” simply fails to record a show, silently, like a thief in the night, stealing our entertainment options away from us.

Perhaps this “DVR” is actually the first phase of the coming machine apocalypse? Is this Skynet’s advance party, come to annoy us to death?

The Play

I’m trying to write a play about the meaning of life, but the meaning keeps changing on me, and I can never seem to finish it.

 

Characters drift in and out without warning, and sometimes events happen for no apparent reason. At times it seems absurd, while at other times events seem to happen for some higher purpose.

 

It started strong, showed promise in the middle, but I seem to be struggling toward the ending. I don’t think it will end today.

 

At least, I hope not.

Life With Eee PC, Day 20: Integration

I’ve had my Eee PC for nearly three weeks. In that time I’ve used it to write many emails on GMail (tried Evolution Mail but it’s just too expansive to fit on the tiny screen), written some online course answers using AbiWord, scanned my wife’s transcript using the XSane Image Scanner, socialized via Twitterfox and gtwitter — in short, it’s become a useful tool rather than a novelty gadget. All this is apart from its daily use as my personal media player (PMP).

My replacement 8GB SDHC card finally arrived courtesy of Newegg, so now I’m rocking an extra 12 gigs of storage (SDHC card + 4GB flash drive) over and above the 4GB internal SSD. I had initially thought that I would use the SDHC card as a test bed to dual-boot the Eee PC, but I’m finding that I’m really happy with EeeXubuntu, and I don’t feel the need to switch to any other OS at the moment. EeeXubuntu is fast, stable, usable, and with access to the entire Ubuntu repositories, highly expandable (something the default Xandros OS is not).

These folks are trying to get Mac OS X Tiger running on the Eee PC.  So far the main problem seems to be that the OS 10.4.9 kernel thinks that one second is 2.6 seconds long on the Eee PC. Several people on the site are offering cash rewards for solutions to getting OS X running smoothly on the Eee PC. Personally, even though I love the Mac OS, I don’t think it’s a good fit for the Eee PC; I think it would need to be heavily modified before it could be useful on the tiny wonder. I’ll be watching their progress, though.

Eee PC as Personal Media Player

One thing I really like about using my Eee PC as a Personal Media Player (PMP) as opposed to what I’d erstwhile been using, my 5th-gen iPod with video, is that I no longer have to use iSquint (a tremendous piece of software, don’t get me wrong) to convert each and every one of my DivX files to mpeg-4 or h.264, the only video formats that the 5G iPod understands.

With VLC installed on my Eee PC, I can view pretty much any video format ever devised.

Having no limitations on what video formats will work on my PMP?

I could get used to this.